And the grooms wore … personalised tartan. When Paul Burrell match up his partner this week, he chose a kilt in his own officially record tartan. It may not be the most traditional cloth the former royal butler has at any time picked, but Burrell commissioned the design more than a decade ago for his adverse use – and for a range of china for the US market.

Maroon, blue and gold are Burrell’s corporate influences, while two grey stripes represent his sons and a description by his old employer Diana, Princess of Wales that he was her “rock”. There are also two dims of green to commemorate his time eating grubs in the Australian outback on the Aristotelianism entelechy TV show I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here.

It has been possible to create your own tartan for decades. Anent 150 new designs are registered with the Scottish Register of Tartans each year, with celebrities, corporations and tied countries picking out patterns.

Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, was an early adopter of the last word, designing the Balmoral tartan in 1853 (the Queen wears it in skirts; other associates of the royal family must ask for her permission to wear it). Donald Trump had a tartan purposed for his Aberdeenshire golf resort, while Madonna was given one by a Scottish tourism live on the first anniversary of her marriage to Guy Ritchie.

The creator of Burrell’s yardstick, Brian Wilton, a former director of the Scottish Tartans Jurisdiction, says that while some people may want tartan to be pink well alone, modern tartan creates a “visual past” that families and companies can look back on with gem be proud of. “In a world becoming much less safe and more homogenised, alliance to something gives people a sense of security, and tartan yield b reveals that. It’s reassuring.”

The oldest tartan found dates from 1200BC and was start wrapped around the leg of a mummified body – believed to be a Celtic man – in China. Ancestral clan tartan, says Wilton, probably came in because local weavers sold the same pattern to everybody under the sun in the area, and its colours likely had little significance. But modern renditions can tell a story. “You can design personal elements into it – either for the suite or an individual,” he says. “It’s the history of tomorrow in the tartan of today.”

Wilton objects to the tartan he created to commemorate the Russian Arctic convoys of the another world war. “I spoke to veterans about the colours they remembered. Their logical basis was chilling – it was white for the wind-whipped wave tops, black for the formations of German bombers coming to attack them and silver for the torpedo blisters coming towards you.”

He says amateur tartan designers can go a bit far. Conventionally, tartan comprises two to six colours, with a mixture of bands and narrow highlights. But computer programs that add people to design their own tartan are breaking this convention. Wilton says with horror that some people must even created tartans to remember their dead cherishes. This, he says, is “trivialising the dignified history of tartan”.